Captivate: Controlling the Content of an Auto Caption

When recording movies in Captivate, the easiest recording technique is to have Captivate pull the screen shots and create the captions for you. It’s a very cool, fast process. (You can find archived articles on this BLOG that discuss how to record Captivate movies.)

However, it won’t take you long to discover that Captivate has a bizarre way of describing events. For instance, an auto caption that instructs the user to select a command from a menu will say "Select the… menu item." I don’t know about you, but when I want to instruct a user to select a menu command, I say "Select the… command" not "menu item."

Another strange instruction would be for a user to click the Combo Box–otherwise known as a "Pick List" or "Drop Down List."

Of course you can edit a caption on the fly (by double-clicking the caption and displaying its properties). Or you can perform a "round- trip" using Microsoft Word, where you can edit the captions in a Word table and then import the changes back into Captivate. While not particularly difficult, both options can be labor intensive. (You can review an archived article about this on this BLOG.)

Wouldn’t it be nice if the auto captions automatically contained the descriptive phrases you wanted? No problem. You can quickly edit a Captivate support file that will force Captivate to use the event descriptions you want. Here’s how:

1. Open the folder containing Captivate (if Captivate 1, the location is typically C:\Program Files\Macromedia\Captivate; if Captivate 2, the location is typically C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Captivate 2)
2. You will see several files that end with the file-name extension of RDL. All you need to do is open the file with a text editor (such as NotePad) and edit the tags as you see fit. (Caution: It’s a good idea to backup the RDL file you are about to edit so that you can go back to it should things go badly.)
3. In this instance, I want to control any future English captions so I opened CaptureTextTemplates_English.rdl
   
4. Then I scrolled down until I found the following line of text: Object Name="MenuItem" DefaultTemplate="Select the %s menu item"
   
5. I changed the tag so that it read: Object Name="MenuItem" DefaultTemplate="Select the %s command"

   Note that the only change I made was the phrase "menu item" became "command."

6. And Bam, that’s it. Save the text file and close it. Start Captivate and record a movie to test the results.